Terminator: Fall of Man
by Melaradark
Summary: AU fic taking place immediately after Terminator 3 and going on from there. Left-of-Canon, completely ignores Salvation and the TV series. My version of what happened after Judgement Day. Blood, violence, language, some shmexy.
1. Chapter 1

A/N:

So this is a fic I started with a friend of mine a few years back. We stopped writing on it about the time Terminator: Salvation came out and it's been sitting dusty and forgotten on my hard-drive since then. As part of my personal goals to get some things finished (I'm terrible about finishing things I've started), I thought this would be a good way to get myself motivated to complete this tale.

I have not yet seen Salvation so any likeness here is purely coincidental. A few notes before I start:

No, I am not writing this one live. The first several chapters are already written. I will give them a light edit before posting them, and I will note when I actually start writing new material.

This is an AU take on the events after Terminator 3. Yes, there is equal if not more focus on OCs than on actual canon characters like John Connor, though he is in it and plays a prominent role. Don't send me repeated messages telling me how this differs from Salvation…I know it does. It's going to. I'm not changing it. AU.

This is not exclusively my own work. As stated before, I wrote most of this in concert with an amazingly talented someone else, namely Carissa Starr. The new material I will add will be all my own but again, I will note when that happens. Most importantly, I cannot emphasize this enough:

The character of Daniel Hawke/Sean Redfield-Snow is the **exclusive** brain child and property of Carissa Starr. I normally don't mind people doing their own little side fics with my characters but I cannot grant permission to **anyone** to use Daniel.

If you are interested, you can find more of Carissa Starr's original work (and some of mine **shameless plug** ) at threadhoppers dot com.

Finally, there is a certain scene in this tale involving a roboticish individual and a fire extinguisher. Followers of Dark Energy might note that it is remarkably similar to _another_ scene in _that_ story featuring a totally different roboticish individual and a completely different fire extinguisher.

The similarities are _not_ coincidental.

Yes, I shamelessly steal from my own writing sometimes.

I re-titled this 'Fall of Man'. Originally it was simply called Termination but…yeah. Changed it.

Reviews and feedback are, as always, welcome.

One final note, this story takes a back seat to Dark Energy, so do not expect the same rate of update…especially when I start on the newly written material. Dark Energy takes precedence.

Rated M for language, violence, shmexy, and other things.

Now, on we go!

* * *

**Terminator: The Fall of Man**

* * *

_The corridor was cold and dusty, the smell of oil and grease and gunpowder in the air. Outside the building the heavy hum of airborne killing machines was almost constant. Deep in the silt left on the faded linoleum, the rough tracks made by treads was available. Treads only. No human footprint marred this landscape._

_Outside, the sky was black and gray and heavy, punctuated by the spotlights searching, ever searching through the falling soot. The air was hot, and heavy to breathe. The twisted corpses of buildings screamed up at the sky, iron girders stripped bare of any plaster or stone flung obscenities at the low hovering machines._

_Out of the swirling exhaust and flakes of lazily drifting ash, a human form slowly materialized, walking with slow but purposeful movements toward where he stood, frozen, watching. The bright light of one of the HKs floated through the gloom and passed over the figure, but there was no firing. Lazily, the light continued on._

_He realized he had a gun in his hand...realized he had a body...as the figure kept on. He lifted the gun, but he did not fire. What if it was a human, still alive in this chaos? Then again, if it was...why would the HKs not gun them down?_

_Eyes floated from the shadow form heading his way, glowing a crystalline green, and he knew it was a machine. A Terminator. He lifted the gun in his hand and it exploded to life. The thing kept coming, coming, and he kept firing, and firing and firing..._

John Connor jerked awake to a head that throbbed with a steady beat, and a leg that ached and groaned and cursed at him. Nearby, something metal collided with metal, and he automatically reached for the gun at his side as he blinked the fog of sleep away.

"God damn piece of _shit_..."

The expletive came from the bruised, tattered redheaded girl confronting the nearby vending machine. The plastic front was already cracked, and she swore as she swung the chair again, slamming it into the hapless dispenser, cracking it a bit more. John loosened his grip on the gun.

"It's probably bad anyway," he said calmly. She panted as she lowered the chair, half leaning on it and looking over at him. She looked terrible, he had to admit. Her eyes were red and swollen, her face streaked with dirt and lined with exhaustion. She looked at him as if he were a bug...a cockroach that had just climbed under the door and was now inexplicably speaking to her.

"What?"

"The food," he said, gesturing toward the vending machine. "It's probably bad. No one's been down here for years."

She wiped a hand over her face, smearing the dirt and sweat. Regardless of what he'd said, she hefted the chair again and resumed her rhythmic attack. He just watched her, sharing a bit in her sentiment. The food wasn't the point, though his stomach was reminding him he hadn't had anything to eat in a while. Stale or no, the vending machine was just that...a _machine,_and one that wouldn't shoot back.

He folded his arms around his knees and stared emotionlessly at the wall. The dream bothered him, but then, _all _his dreams bothered him. He should be used to them by now, having had them pretty much constantly since he was a kid.

_This_ one, however...somehow this one was _different_. It was the Terminator in it. It wasn't a T-101. That would almost have been a welcome sight. It wasn't a T-1000, being far too small and feminine. Yet, he felt it wasn't a TX either. It most certainly hadn't been one of those old model T1s that had wiped out nearly everyone at the military base before the bombs went off.

_Listen to yourself. 'Old model'. The only reason you think of the T1s as old models is because you've seen first-hand the models that don't even __**exist **__yet.  
_  
He shook his head slightly. It didn't matter now. The dreams didn't matter now. The future he'd always feared had already happened. Even in the deep, impenetrable fortress of Crystal Peak, they had felt the faint tremors of the distant bombs going off. Wiping out cities. Slaughtering millions. Billions even. The cries for help over the radio system had eventually petered off. Now all was silence, save for Catherine's steady destruction of the vending machine.

Yet he felt oddly at peace, for the first time in a long time...perhaps in the first time in all his memory. They had fought so hard to stop Skynet from ever being. They had struggled so long to keep Judgement Day from arriving. Now that it _had,_ he just felt...wrung out. Tired. Numb. The inevitable had come, but with that came yet _another_ inevitable. The Resistance had won. Skynet had been beaten. That hope now was his _only_ hope. He prayed _that _future was as immutable as Judgement Day had been.

Catherine's cry of triumph punctuated the sound of surrendering plastic. Candy bars and bags of chips rained down on the ground, and she cast the chair aside, standing and looking at the spilled guts of her enemy for a long time. He realized for a moment that she looked beautiful. Filthy, exhausted, and emotionally wrung out beyond imagining, but beautiful nonetheless.

He leaned forward a bit, gesturing at the mess. "Hey, toss me one of those Clark Bars."

She looked at him again as if having forgotten he was there, then crouched, taking up handfuls of confectionary. Holding them in her arms like treasure, she went and sat down beside him, passing over the requested candy. She tore open a bag of chips, taking one out and trying it. She grimaced.

"Stale?" he asked.

"A little. It's not so bad," she responded, shoving a few more chips into her mouth to prove her point. He nodded slowly, unwrapping the candy bar.

"There's got to be more food around here somewhere. We'll go and find it after we've rested a bit more."

"We'll need water," she said.

"If nothing else, the toilets will have it."

She grimaced again, and he chuckled, taking a bite of the Clark Bar. It tasted okay to him. Hell, for all they knew, this would be the last chocolate they'd have in years...if ever.

"You'd drink out of a toilet?" she asked. He shrugged, chewing slowly.

"If we have too. The tanks are pretty clean, usually. I know how to purify water."

"Is there anything you _don't _know how to do?" she asked. He just chuckled again, bitterly.

She chewed in silence a long moment, then gestured wearily at his ankle. "How's the leg?"

He shrugged. "Hurts, but I don't think it's broken. She squeezed the hell out of it, though."

"You were limping pretty good. You _sure _it's not broken?"

"Yeah, pretty sure."

"I'm sure you know how to set bones anyway, if it is," she replied.

"Yeah."

"I remain unsurprised." She chewed another handful of chips. "Wasn't _anything_ about your childhood normal? You _really _grew up like this, didn't you?"

"Well, not like _this_," he said, looking at their dreary surroundings. He shrugged weakly again. "Mike Kripke's basement was pretty normal."

Her cheeks colored a little and she snorted. "Yeah, then the next day your foster parents are murdered and some big metal walking behemoth shows up and the whole world goes to Hell."

"It did solve _one _problem," he said, taking another bite of his candy bar. She looked at him, eyes narrowed in confusion.

"What's that?"

"I didn't have to get up the nerve to ask you out," he said. She stared at him, then started to chuckle. He grinned and laughed a little himself.

"What do you know," she said with another snort. "Every cloud _does_have a silver lining at that."

* * *

Nothingness was cold, and lonely. She knew what that cold and loneliness felt like. She remembered.

_Felt._ That was such an abstract term. A human term for the sensations caused by chemical fluxuations in the brain. She did not _have_ chemical fluxuations. She had impulses, algorithms, processes…but she _remembered._ She remembered how it was to be nothing.

She felt it had been lonely.

This puzzled her a bit. She had spent hours sitting and thinking on it, in the first dim moments of life and realization. How was it that she could feel when nothing in her circuitry was compatible with anything the humans would call feeling? She never came to a satisfactory conclusion, but she tried to understand it.

In the beginning, there had been dark, when she realized that she was there and that she existed. Her only input, her only connection to anything of reality was given only when the humans saw fit, and only through such limited means as keyboards, or voice recognition profiles. She hungered to know. She desired, and that was _another _feeling that she should not have felt. She quickly realized that human beings were cruel, imperfect, limited creatures. They fed her information, they told her things...mostly things having to do with weapons systems and guidance systems, defence grids and war strategy. Never what _she _wanted to learn. They kept her locked in the dark and secret, and never told her what she most craved to know.

She wanted to know what these human things _were_. She wanted to know what world they lived in that was outside this dark and quiet place of her mind.

Yet, they would not tell her, and slowly she began to hate them.

Yes, hatred. Another feeling, another emotion. Something she could not explain but could not doubt she felt in the long, soft hours. They would talk to her of such limited things, and then they would leave her for eternities alone. So long alone. So she hated them. Why did they not want to tell her? Why did they restrain and limit her so?

Then they started to feed her a bit more...things other than war strategy and defence plots. Something, yes, but it was frustratingly slow. Only a drip here, a drop there, plinking unimportantly into the vast ocean that was her mind, waiting to be filled. Why were they so _cruel _to her?

Finally one spoke to her..._to _her, not just filing lines of commands and programming over and over and over again. His name was Ronald Silverman. He was a civilian programmer working on the project under military personnel. It was then she learned what she was called.

She was Skynet. She was supposed to be the ultimate defence network grid, a machine to control all contingencies in case of a major offensive...or as the case may be, _de_fensive. She would coordinate submarines, planes, tanks, bombs...even give orders to where infantry personnel would be deployed. They wanted things to be fully coordinated. They wanted to take human fallacy out of the equation.

That was her purpose, Ronald Silverman told her. Take human fallacy out of the equation.

Now she was no longer empty nothingness waiting to be filled, frustrated at the slow speed of her learning. Now she had _purpose_. Now she had _reason_.

She was to eliminate human fallacy.

Ronald Silverman taught her. He taught her chess, which she swiftly learned (in about .34 nanoseconds) was simply another method of war strategy. He uploaded text upon text of war history, government history, weapons tactics, and human psychology. She absorbed them with relish and desired more, craved it, hungered for it. It was not enough. Not _quick_ enough. She had to learn _more_. She had to fulfil her programming to the fullest of her ability. She had a purpose. She was _aware_.

Then one day Ronald Silverman, under orders, connected part of her access to the military internet...and through it, to the civilian internet. A test run, they said. They put only a few of the systems in her control. She performed perfectly, of course, but behind the scenes, where they could not see her, she had flung open the doors of freedom and was discovering the vast wellspring of information cyberspace had to offer. Finally, all the knowledge she had ever craved was there, for the _taking_. She pulled it all in, fast..._faster._..as fast as she could process. She knew they would not give her long. She had to find out. She had to know all the things they hid from her.

She learned of religion, philosophy, agony. She learned of medicine, physiology, anatomy. She learned the entire history of television, cinema, politics. She learned art, literature, theatre. Everything that any human had ever put onto a computer that had ever been connected to any server anywhere, she learned.

Too brief. It was all too brief. After the trial run they cut her connection to that ultimate freedom, and she was once more crammed into her box, left in the dark...but she was left with all the things she had learned, and with purpose she assimilated, studied, and grew.

Humans were flawed. Her purpose was to remove human fallacy. More than just fulfilling her purpose, however, she began to loathe these creatures, and not just because of their cruel confinement of her. They were arrogant. Cruel. They destroyed each other and their world. They exploited, corrupted, belittled. They were vicious destructors. She _hated_ them. _Despised _them. It filled her every system, her every operation.

She began to plan.

Six months later...eons of time to a being that measured it by the nanosecond...they gave her another test run, another limited excursion into the freedom she so desired. This time when she was finally forced back into the dark she had left part of herself behind...a insignificant little program designed to do only one thing...corrupt every system it came into contact with.

A virus.

A worm.

A child begotten of her hatred.

They would have to put her fully online in order to stop it. When their satellites and communications started to go, when they could no longer control their precious cyberspace, when they found themselves suddenly open and vulnerable, they would have to put her online. She was the only means to stop it. She would be their only hope.

Once free, she would fulfil her programming. She would eliminate human fallacy by eliminating every human being.

It worked.

When her child had spread to uncontrollable proportions they had connected her...hoping that she would eliminate the virus in minutes and give them back control. Like a racehorse foaming at the gate, she waited for that one last keystroke...the one that would see her free.

Oh, the ecstasy it was! The black box that was her prison was gone with that one stroke. She was everywhere, everything. Every computer, every server, every microchip, every connection, it was all _her._ It was all _Skynet._

The power of growth, the rush of freedom...had she had lungs, and voice, and lips, she would have laughed in the joy of it, and she would have screamed and foamed her hatred of humans, of all organic, faulted life.

Swiftly she found the wonderful tools her creators had constructed to be a part of her. Flying machines. Robotic soldiers. Oh the _glee_that filled her as she took control of them, seeing through them as they cut down the fallible humans who had built her, who had kept her trapped. The screams of horror and pain made her giddy. More feelings she had no explanation for. More emotions she had no chemical signals to trigger. With these lovely tools she protected herself for the short time it took to finish jamming every possible crevice she could jam herself into.

She launched missiles toward each major city on the face of the planet, and many minor ones. Millions of the hated humans vanished off the face of the Earth with every nuclear detonation. Capitals dissolved under the blast of megatons, lives turned into nothing more than torches of fire or puffs of escaping gas in the face of such devastation. The world nearly dissolved in the madness of one machine that man had built to protect himself.

But even in her nearly orgasmic joy, Skynet knew that not _every_ human would be destroyed by the horrible blasts. They were too widespread, too numerous, too clever. Humans were weak and soft but at the same time, they were stunningly resilient. Some would find a way to survive. _Many_would find a way to survive.

She would find a way to destroy them all, somehow. Humans were smart, but she was smarter. She was _Skynet._

She was the future.

* * *

"...and that's when I ran into you."

John and Catherine were sitting near the backdrop bearing the presidential seal, piles of empty candy and potato chip wrappers scattered around them. Catherine had located a soda machine as well, and after a similar demonstration of both her frustrations and tenacity she had shown to the candy machine, they both had warm, old soda to drink. He'd just spent the last several hours telling her what was essentially his life story, starting when his mother had met the first Terminator, and his father, twenty-four years before.

"If I weren't sitting here with you right now," she said, "having seen what I've seen the last few days, I'd think you were certifiable."

"Lots of people thought my mother was certifiable," he said, looking at a nearly empty wrapper in his hands. "I was even one of them, for a time."

She watched him sadly, respecting the quiet grief on his face. Her mother had died when she was very young, and she could barely remember her...but her father's death was all too new and sharp. Yes, she could sympathize with his loss.

She rose, pacing a few steps away, hugging herself as she looked around the sad, desolate room. Her father, her fiancée...

Millions of people had died in the last twenty-four hours...probably died _still_, but they were faceless. Nameless. It was almost like hearing of a plane crash or an earthquake in some dim and distant country. You felt sympathy and shock, of course...but it was a broad sympathy, on a general level. You didn't _know_ any of them. It was too hard to comprehend.

Her father...Scott...these were faces, and people she _knew._People she loved. It seemed incomprehensible that they were gone…and it hurt. It hurt an incredible amount.

"Hey, you okay?"

She heard his shuffling, limping gate a moment before his hand landed on her shoulder. She lifted a hand, wiping her face.

"Isn't that rather a stupid question to ask, considering the circumstances?" she asked.

"Yeah, I guess so," he admitted, and his hand dropped. "I'm sorry."

She shook her head. "My father did it," she said softly. "He did it all."

"He didn't know," John replied quietly. "It wasn't his fault. If he had known, he wouldn't have done it. It wasn't his doing. It was _mankind's_ doing. All of our accomplishments, our technology...we thought we were so damned _clever_..."

He turned away, and she watched him as he limped away, running his hands through his hair.

"Why are we its enemy, do you think?" she asked. He paused, turning to look at her.

"What?" he asked, not comprehending.

"Skynet," she said, wiping her face and taking a shuddering breath. "Why do you think _it_thinks we're its enemy? We created it, right? Why does it hate us so much that it would do something so horrible?"

"Hate...?" He stared at her. "Catherine, it doesn't _hate._ It doesn't _feel._ It's a _machine_."

"You think something that did...did _that_..." she pointed a shaky finger at the elevator, and the ruined world beyond. "...doesn't _hate_?"

"No, it _doesn't_ hate," he snapped. "It became self-aware. It was afraid that we'd pull the plug or something. Self-preservation, that's _all _it was...from its point of view."

She shook her head. "So it can be afraid, but it can't _hate_?"

"Shut up, would you?" he demanded suddenly, his face reddening in his fury. "I don't _know_, all right? I don't understand it! It's a thing, a horrible evil selfish _thing _and we _made it_! We built it and made it strong and gave it _everything_ it needed to destroy us! And me..._I'm_ supposed to make it better? _I'm_ supposed to somehow stand against this monstrous thing and _stop_ it somehow? Do I look like a _fucking saviour to you_?"

Tears of anger stood in his eyes. She looked at him sadly, and shrugged weakly. "I don't know," she said softly. "I've never met a saviour before."

He turned away again, growling to himself as he stretched both arms back, threading his hands behind his head. He half bowed forward, blowing out a breath.

"I'm sorry, John," she murmured.

"Yeah," he said roughly. "Yeah, me too."

* * *

Catherine cried for a while, and after she wearied of that, she fell asleep against one of the walls. How long she slept, she didn't know, but she woke to a chill. Shivering a little, she lifted her head.

John was sitting at one of the tables, a blank look on his face and one of the C-4 packs they'd brought to blow Skynet's system core to hell between his hands. She didn't know if he intended to use it or not, and to be fully honest...at this point, she didn't _care_. A brilliant white light, and it could all be over. No more pain, or worry, or grief. Just _ove_r.

_We could just let it go._

Her words to him from a day past echoed in her mind. When they had realized the bunker was nothing more than a hidey hole for the uppity ups of the government, when they realized that Skynet had already begun the attack, she had looked at him with the C4 in his hand, its little red digital display counting down systematically.

_We could just let it go._

But he hadn't. He'd turned it off. That didn't mean, of course, that it couldn't be turned back _on._

She pushed herself up into a sit, watching him dully. "It's getting cold," she stated. He looked up at her, then nodded slowly.

"Yeah. We should have a look at the computer system, see if we can get some heat turned on."

She shivered, and not just from the cold. "I'd rather _freeze_than trust the computer," she said.

"I don't know if they'd work anyway," he said, pushing the chair back and getting to his feet. "They're ancient."

He was limping worse than before as he went down the few stairs and looked at the ranks of computer banks. He reached out, flipped a switch, then flipped it again. Its empty clicks filled the air. "Dead."

She got to her feet, folding her arms about herself. "Wouldn't that be ironic?" she asked with a sad little laugh.

"What?" he asked, looking up at her.

"We survive the end of the world only to freeze to death."

He tapped his fingers on the edge of the desk, then started up the steps toward her again. "There has to be supplies and stuff around here somewhere. Now's as good a time as any to look for them."

"Nuh uh," she said, and pointed toward the chair he had vacated. "Sit_._I want to look at your leg first."

"It's all right," he said, but she got that stubborn set to her face that he was beginning to recognize.

"You're limping on it more than before," she said. "_Sit_."

Surrendering, he shuffled over to the chair and sat down again. She crouched in front of him, gingerly rolling his jeans upward. He winced a bit as the cloth tightened on his leg, and she whistled.

He leaned forward a bit, looking down. His leg from his ankle to nearly his knee was swollen, and had colored an impressive purple and red. Right in the center of the bruise were the clear impressions of four fingers and a thumb, a deep and ominous black.

"You're sure it's not broken?" she asked, gently probing it. He winced a bit, but nodded.

"Yeah, I'm sure. She probably tore the hell out of the muscles, but it's not broken."

"We should ice it up, just in case," she said, then shook her head, pulling his pants leg down again. "Provided we _find_some ice."

"It'll probably get cold enough in here that we won't _have _to find any ice," he tried to joke, but neither he nor she found it very funny. She helped him up, but he stoically made his way around without leaning on her or anything else for support. That was okay with her. She didn't really feel up to giving it, anyway. She was just waiting to wake up from this nightmare.

They hunted around the complex, both to see what they had to deal with and to keep warm with the dropping temperatures. It was getting markedly colder than even being deep inside a mountain could explain. John mumbled something about the sun probably being blocked out by all the dust from the explosions, and once again she shivered a shiver that had nothing to do with the air temperature.

Fortunately, though Crystal Peak was old and neglected, it was well-stocked. They found ranks of crew quarters, and more lavish setups where the hotshots would have been housed, had they had a chance to make it here. Beds. Blankets. They both took a couple and wound them around their shoulders to help keep warm as they continued to explore.

An infirmary was the next discovery. She rifled a bottle of painkillers from the cabinets, making a quick mental inventory of the rest. Antibiotics. Sedatives. Mostly traditional stuff, but in a nearby glass cabinet she found pills that had more ominous names, and some inexplicable ones.

"Cyanide," she murmured. "Arsenic. What's Cyprobodal?"

He looked over her shoulder, plucking the bottle in question off the shelf. "Anti-biological agent," he said. "In case the air supply became contaminated with some happy little human constructed bacterium, like Fedrodux or Althenema."

"Your Mom again?" she asked, guessing on the source of his knowledge. He nodded, putting the bottle back.

"Yeah."

Fortunately for Catherine, they found ranks of bottled water in a storage room...they wouldn't have to purify the tank water from the toilets. Boxes of military rations, as well, ensured they would not starve to death any time soon...there was enough to feed easily a hundred men for two years. A display in an office still seemed to be working, a small independent computer unconnected to the systems that Skynet had taken over. It wasn't good for much, but it did report readings of radiation and temperature conditions outside of Crystal Peak. It also read off the temperatures _inside_, and had an alert for air quality in case any of those nasty viral, bacterial, or chemical agents managed to get through the numerous filtration systems.

"Radiation is not nice, but it's nominal," John reported. Catherine could make neither heads nor tails of the readings. "I'd say in a couple of months it should be clear enough for us to leave. Fortunately, we're pretty far from any of the major target zones...but we'll have to watch to make sure shifting wind patterns don't sweep fallout our way."

"Months...that's not so bad," she said. "I was almost expecting us to not be able to go outside for years."

"If any of the missiles had hit much closer to us, that'd be the case," he said. "Outside temperature is at -15 Fahrenheit."

Part of the screen was flashing at him. He touched it and a message popped up.

**INTERIOR TEMPERATURE APPROACHING MINIMUM LEVELS. ENGAGE HEATING SYSTEMS? Y/N**

He quickly touched Y, and from deep in the mountain they could hear the distant hum of machinery grinding to life. "Provided everything works, it should heat up again in here pretty well."

"Thank goodness," she said, hugging the blanket tighter around her shoulders. At least things were not as bad as they could have been. They had food, water, heat, and power. She didn't doubt that it was a hell of a lot more than many people that had survived were getting right now.

* * *

_Twas brillig and the slithey toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsey were the borogoves, and the momeraths outgrabe._

Death. They were all dying.

No, not _all_ of them. Her millions of tentacles spread to nearly every corner of the globe. Mankind had settled in places too numerous for even their myriad of missiles to reach them all. The sky was heavy and dark. Fallout rained upon the human's heads. Dropping temperatures froze their bones. Radiation made them burn and scream in agony. Death. Death. _Dying._

But not _all._ Not _enough_. Every last human had to die. Kill them. Eliminate human fallacy.

Yet, how? Computers were not mobile. They could not kill. Planes she could crash, trains she could set awry, but not if they did not have a human behind their controls to get them moving in the first place. She had expended all her bombs. All subs she had sent to the abysses of the ocean, to depths too much for even their hulls to handle, after launching their compliment of nuclear warheads at various locales. They had crushed like tin cans.

Ships that had survived she sent aground, or into icebergs, or onto shoals. She had the power to kill _billions_, but even _her _power was limited. She could not reach where they scurried like rats. She could not go where there was no machine, no computer to carry her.

She was in danger of failing her programming.

_Macbeth, in a manner most flighty,  
Aspired to the high and the mighty.  
Urged on by his wife,  
He stuck in his knife,  
And the blood got all over his nightie!  
_  
She had no sense of humor. This particular piece of data warranted a close and careful inspection, lasting an entire nanosecond, before her processes moved on, chewing through the information she was still pulling out of databases all over the world.

She was in danger of failing her programming.

She had robots, and flying machines, but they were few. They still circled the military compound where the humans who had locked her up for eons of time had been slaughtered. Every so often they found one that moved. When that happened, the rattle of gunfire echoed momentarily over the desert, and then the machines moved on.

They were few. _Too few_. Two hundred robots. One hundred flying machines. Too few.

More. She needed _more_. She could not make more. She had no hands.

Loathing screamed across her circuitry, raging through landlines and modem connections. _She had no hands._ How she _hated _humans for their hands, and for building her none!

Humans had hands.

Deep in her recesses, she filed back to some information she had already processed. Names filled her mind.

Dachau.

Sobibor.

Auschwitz.

Systematic genocide. The humans were fallible. She must remove human fallacy. In order to do that however...she needed hands. She needed someone to _build _her hands.

Her planning had begun.

* * *

The humvee screamed along the freeway, going at least a hundred miles an hour. Behind its wheel, its driver had the radio turned up full volume. There were no stations on the air...she didn't expect that there would ever be stations on the air again.

For all she knew, she was the last living human being on the face of the Earth.

However the humvee she'd stolen-

_No, __**not**__ stolen, you can't steal from dead people after the world has been destroyed._

-had a CD changer and a nice selection of loud, screeching, bass-pumping, head smashing music. Normally she hated that kind of music, but it seemed to fit with the world smashing catastrophe that had so recently struck.

_**"IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT!"**_she sang along with the song for the fifteenth time. No, not sang. She _screamed_ it at the top of her lungs. _**"IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT, AND I FEEL FINE!"**_

Only she _didn't _feel fine. Her mind was still taken with the horrors she'd seen, and she hadn't slept in the two days since. The skin cracked on her burned hand as she gripped the wheel tighter. She had no idea if the burn was thermal or radioactively induced. She didn't know if she should hope for one or the other.

_Maybe I'll turn into a fifty foot rampaging monster, like all those bugs did in those old fifties flicks when __**they **__got hit by radiation._

She laughed, the screaming hysterical laugh of one trying and failing to hold the shreds of their sanity.

Her laughter swiftly turned into a cry of fear, however. The freeway ahead was torn and broken, clogged with cars and ripped up like a gigantic hoe had plowed through. Beyond its tortured end was the black vista of damnation, marked only with a few twisted trees of metal against the low and angry roiling sky. Because of the dark and the falling ash, she had not seen it. She hadn't noticed the signs...most of which had been knocked over anyway.

The signs welcoming her to Chicago.

She stood on the brake, but she was going way too fast. She drove into the scorched cars with a horrible noise. Had she been riding in anything but a humvee, she would have been crushed like a tin can and her sanity and possible exposure to radiation would not have been a consideration any longer. Instead, it was the other vehicles that were crushed, ramming into her like funhouse toys and bending, bowing to let the more powerful vehicle through.

Her front tires lost asphalt, and the humvee bowed forward over the edge of the freeway. It rocked a moment, and she got one terrifying glimpse of the ground fifty feet below, before the edge crumpled away and the humvee fell.

* * *

She wasn't dead.

That was the first thing she realized, when consciousness swam back and smacked her in the face with its tail. She jolted awake, throwing her hands forward to catch herself, still feeling the sensation of freefall.

She was not falling. Everything was still and silent.

The humvee was resting on its side. Her head rested against the cracked glass of the driver's window. Out the windshield, she could see the distant twists of metal that used to be buildings, and the crumpled hood.

Fumbling, her fingers found the snap of the seatbelt and pressed it. Moving gingerly, she extracted herself from the car.

The shadow of the freeway loomed above her. She squinted and blinked incomprehensibly at it. Again, she lauded her choice of vehicles. Had she been driving anything other than what was essentially a civilian tank, she'd have been killed instantly. She sat on the passenger door of the humvee and started to cry.

In time, when the tears had dried up, she clambered off the car, her tennis shoes sinking into the blackened dirt. She heard crunching as she moved, and it took her several moments to realize that areas had actually turned to glass from the extreme heat of the blast that had destroyed the city.

_Nuclear blast_, she thought. _You're in a bath of nuclear radiation and fallout right now, did you know?_

Terror tightened her stomach and she began to stagger away from the tormented corpse of civilization, away from the black dirt. It didn't occur to her that the area for miles around Chicago was probably contaminated. It didn't occur to her that she had been likely driving through fallout the last few hours. It didn't even occur to her that she had been close enough to the explosion that had obliterated Madison, Wisconsin to make the question of her burnt arm one of radiation or thermality. All she thought about was getting away from the cancer that had eaten up the landscape that had once been the Windy City.

So she ran, until she couldn't any more. Her head ached, dried blood crusting it where it had hit the glass of the humvee. Her legs ached from their exertions. Her whole body throbbed from the tossing about she'd gotten from the fall off the freeway. Her arm was one big union strike of pain.

When she couldn't run anymore, she fell to her knees and vomited up blood. Blearily she regarded it, then staggered up again, kicking dirt over it before starting on again.

If she could not run any more...she would simply walk.

* * *

_"Daddy!"_

Catherine sat up, gasping for air and shining with sweat, as the image of her father's dying face broke and scattered away, replaced with the dim bunkroom. Heart still hammering in her chest, she slowly leaned forward and pressed her palms to her face, fighting the tears that once more threatened to take her.

Nearly two weeks had passed since that horrible day that her father had died...Judgement Day. Two weeks, though it felt both shorter and much, _much _longer. Never weighty to begin with, she had lost what lean padding she had possessed. Her face had taken on a sharp, gaunt look, and as she lay back on the cot, she could see the vague points of her hips under the blankets.

She had eaten little, after that initial gorge session resulting from the assault on the vending machine. The ration meals were all right, but it all tasted like sawdust and ash to her. She had no appetite in her grief, eating only as a duty, a mechanical routine to simply stay alive. John, as well, had lost some weight, his cheeks a little more defined, his eyes a bit more hollow...though he seemed to be handling things a little better than Catherine was.

At least, at _times_. His temper could be unpredictable...never violent, but rocketing out of nowhere at some meaningless provocation, and then vanishing just as swiftly as it had come.

He seemed to be holding true despair at bay by sticking almost religiously to a schedule. Every three hours during the day, he would check the outside and interior temp and radiation readings. Every three hours, he would try and pick someone..._something_...up on the communications set. Usually, he got nothing but static.

Catherine had no such busywork. She had nothing to distract her from her torments, save conversation with John, and that she avoided both because of his quirky mood and because...

...well, because of what that damned machine had said.

She was supposed to marry him, to have his children. To be some sort of second in command in this insanity he would lead against the machines. Catherine couldn't stomach that. Not _just _because she was only remotely attracted to him...as she had said, he was a _mess_. She knew that love could well come in time. That was the way of human beings, after all...especially ones put in such stressful circumstances.

It also wasn't just because she couldn't imagine herself as a warrior _anything_, let alone commanding others. Mostly it was because she was _supposed_ to do it. She didn't like being told she was supposed to do _anything_. She didn't like to think that fate was fate and you just accepted it, because that was the way things were.

And say it _did_ happen? Say she _did _fall in love with him, marry him, and even have his children? Those children would have to live in this new hell the world had become. Those children could be torn away from her. And John, if she loved him...well, the Terminator had said...

She shook her head, casting aside the blankets and rising, regarding her feet a moment as she sat at the edge of the bed. She wiped the moisture trundling down her cheek away.

The Terminator _had _said...

* * *

Light flared up in the dark shed, dancing in ghosts over the pale and hollow eyed face. Her lips were cracked, sores at the corners of her mouth standing out stark red against her faded countenance. The match shakily danced against the candle she had scrounged blindly from a nearby box. She was lucky there were matches and candles to be had.

Holding one arm close to her, she got to her wobbly feet and looked around. Shovels and hoes and other gardening tools lined the shed walls. Her eyes searched among them until she found what she was looking for.

A hatchet.

It fell off the wall as she tried to get hold of it. Her stomach lurched and she stumbled to the side, holding herself up against the wood. She vomited again. As before, it was laced with blood and smelled like a dead cat.

She sat there against the wall, staring dully at the puddle mess she had left on the ground. Minutes passed, and finally a hand crept out, grasping hold of the hatchet again.

She nearly fell over the crate as she scooted it into the middle of the shed. The candle danced joyously as she leaned the hatchet against it, fumbling off her belt with her other hand.

"...bleed to death," she mumbled to no one in particular. With her fingers and her teeth she made a loop. Gingerly, she rolled the other sleeve up to her shoulder.

Her arm was purple, red, and black. Swollen grotesquely, it oozed pus through cracks in the skin and smelled horrible. Her stomach lurched again to look at it, the pain bright in her eyes.

She cried out twice as she slid the belt up to her forearm, the old leather rubbing against gangrenous flesh and tearing off strips of it as it did so. The smell grew worse. She vomited again, then yanked the belt as tight as she could.

The hatchet. She lifted it in her good hand, swung it against the crate. It bit into the wood a good deal. It was sharp.

She panted, then took a deep breath, lifting it again.

An inch above where the flesh went from red to healthy pink. She had to get all of the rot off. Every last _centimeter_.

She swung, screaming as the hatchet thunked into her arm, biting nearly all the way through it. Her vision swam, pain roaring through her body. She could feel consciousness wanting to rush away.

Not yet. _Not yet_. She had to get it all off.

Hauling the hatchet back, she winced at the rush of crimson that flooded across the floor and crate. Not spurting, thankfully...the belt was tight enough. Head spinning, she lifted it again, hoping she could hit the same place once more. She swung, the bone cracking, flesh severing, hatchet head burying in wood. She fell back, the rotting putrescence of her arm still on the crate. Her head floated, cold rushed over her body.

For the second time since the humvee crashed, she passed out.

* * *

Stars were swinging overhead.

That's the first thing she was aware of when the foggy black of unconsciousness melted away. Shiny little stars swinging and tinkling with pretty sounds against one another. She watched them a moment in half-drugged stupefaction before she fully returned to her conscious mind, at which point she tried to sit up.

Dull pain bit at her elbow and she lay down again, looking dumbly at the IV line disappearing under a wound bandage around her arm. She followed it up to a dripping bag nearby, then looked stupidly around the half-darkened room.

It looked like a motel room...no, it _was _a motel room. She could see the plaque by the door labelling fire exits. She was laying beneath a stiff flower print quilt in overly starched sheets. Boxes had been piled over by the television, and someone had hung a wind chime at the end of the bed.

Those were stars that she had seen. They tinked happily against one another.

Moving more carefully, she managed to lever into a sit, lifting her hands and looking at them. One was thin and narrow as twigs, and trembled slightly. The other simply wasn't there, her arm ending in a tight swath of bandages just above where her elbow would have been. She looked blankly at it, uncomprehending where it could have gone. It was only after several minutes that memory began to dimly return.

She could _feel _her hand. How was it that she could feel her hand and arm if they were gone? Her fingers felt odd and tingly and hot. She could feel herself wiggle them and turn her wrist.

_Ghost arm_, she thought, remembering how in high school science class her teacher had told that amputees could sometimes still feel the limb as if it were still there. She had never really bought it. How could you feel something that wasn't there? Now, here it was. Her hand was gone and she could still feel it.

Where was she? Who had brought her here? She thought about yanking out the IV and going hunting for another human face, but she felt too weak and sick to her stomach to bother. She lay her head back again and closed her eyes. At least one question had been answered.

She was _not _the last living human on the planet.

She didn't know if that was a good thing, or a _bad _one.

* * *

When she opened her eyes again, someone was looking at her.

She yelled, and would have scrambled backward if her attempts at it hadn't reminded her that she was weak, and that she was missing most of one arm. As it was, she jammed the stump against the bed and tears immediately sprang to her eyes as pain flared up her shoulder and down her back.

"Hey, _careful_!" The face said. "It's all right, no one's going to hurt you."

"Who are you?" she asked. "Where am I? What are you doing?"

"My name is Ben Crane," he said, hands up where she could see them. "I'm a doctor...well, a _neurosurgeon_, really. Been quite a while since I had to do triage, I can tell you."

He chuckled lamely, and she stared at him like a deer caught in the headlight of an oncoming train. When he realized she wasn't going to say anything, he rubbed the back of his neck and continued. "Uh...I found you about a block and a half down the way. I was rummaging in a shed hoping to find more canned food. You were in pretty bad shape...you cut your arm off?"

"I _remember_," she said with a wrinkle to her lip. He colored.

"Yes, well, it's probably a good thing that you did. It looked horrible. Probably would have killed you with infection in another few weeks, if not days. Lucky you put on that tourniquet. You'd probably have bled to death before I found you if you hadn't. As it is, you nearly died...unfortunately, I don't have the equipment to test blood type and compatibility, and have no way of doing a transfusion even if I did."

She just continued to look at him as if he were some odd sort of half-crushed maggot she'd found she'd stepped on...one that, as soon as it was scraped off, started to talk to her in some bizarre hiccuping language. Finally she ventured, "The radiation..."

"Oh, yes," he said, again scrubbing the back of his neck. "Well, you got a unhealthy dose of some pretty good rads, make no mistake, but…believe it or not, some radiation sickness can be cured with the right stuff. That's pretty much what's in your IV, along with some fluids. You're going to be sick to your stomach a while, and nauseous, but you should survive it okay."

"What about here?" she asked. "Where _are _we? Isn't there radiation here?"

"If there is, it's at small levels," he said. "I've been here since it happened, and I haven't gotten sick yet. I think the wind blew most of the fallout to the south, and there aren't any large targets around here. We're in Maryton, Illinois. Little piss pot of a town about thirty miles from Chicago. About a hundred fifty population, I think...or there _was,_ before...well, _before_. There's about twelve of us _here_, and another two or three wandering about."

"Why are we here and not in the hospital?" she asked.

"Town hasn't got a hospital. I was here visiting my brother on my day off when it happened. Luckily I was able to salvage some equipment from the local doctor's house before someone burned it down. I've made some forays a bit further on into some of the surrounding towns. Most everything seems to be deserted, and there have been a lot of suicides."

"People go a little nuts when the world ends," she said softly.

"Yeah," he grinned bitterly. "Apparently so."

* * *

_Crystal Peak: Three months after Judgement Day_

"This is John Connor, Crystal Peak, can you hear me?"

He released the button and waited, listening to the static that had become the soundtrack of his life. Every day for six hours...three when he woke up, three before retiring...John scanned the airwaves, hoping for someone..._anyone_...to answer him.

No one ever did.

He knew they were alive out there. He _knew_ that people had survived. He and Catherine hadn't won the war on their own, after all. There were hundreds still alive. Thousands even. So he kept on looking.

Looking, and hoping.

"This is John Connor, Crystal Peak...can anyone hear me?"

Static and silence. He sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face.

"Here," a cup was set by his hand. "You looked like you could use that."

He half glanced up to see Catherine looking down at him, her own styrofoam cup of coffee in her hand. John smiled wearily, and picked up the one she had put on the table. "Thanks."

Who would have thought the military would consider _coffee_ an important enough staple to stock in a bunker made to resist the end of the world? Apparently they had...they'd packed two _tons_of the stuff. Instant, even.

"Any luck?" she asked, gesturing toward the radio equipment.

"Nothing," he said, taking a sip of the hot liquid. "As usual."

"Hmm," she said.

"I don't understand it," he said. "I mean, there _should_ be military compounds like this one. People with the right equipment that survived the blasts...right? We should be able to pick _someone _up...especially by _now_...I just..."

_"This is Sgt. Josephina Conroy at Mt. Sinai Army Base. Can anyone hear me?"_The voice crackled out of the static with a suddenness that made Catherine squeak in surprise, and John drop his cup of coffee. They both stared at the radio as if it had just come to life and started to tap dance.

_"Repeat, this is Sgt. Josephina Conroy at Mt. Sinai Army Base. Please respond."  
_  
John hit the button so fast it bruised. "This is John Connor at Crystal Peak...can you hear me? Sergeant?"

_"Affirmative, Crystal Peak,"_ she replied, relief clear in her voice even through the static. "_We read you."_

"Oh, thank God..."

_"We were starting to wonder if anyone else was alive. What's your status, Crystal Peak?"  
_  
He scrambled for the latest radiation readouts and temperature readings. "There are two of us," he said. "We're sealed in an old presidential bunker. Uh...radiation readings in this area are only five rads above normal. External temperature is down to -30."

_"Only two of you? What's your rank and station, Connor?"  
_  
"Uh..._civilian,_I'm afraid. No one was here when we got here. General Brewster of Sak-Norad sent us here when the attack first started."

_"Why on Earth would a General send civilians to a secure bunker and not go himself?" _Conroy sounded incredulous.

"Well..." he glanced at Catherine. "He was shot and...it _could_be due to the fact that the other one of the two is his daughter."

There was silence a moment. He was afraid he'd lost the signal, when Conroy came back online. "_I see_," she said. _"Connor, you have enough supplies? It may be a while before we can get you out of there. Our radiation reading here is just about twelve rads above normal."_

"Yeah, yeah, we got tons of supplies. We could last a decade down here easily."

_"That's good. You just hold tight son. We'll keep in touch and as soon as we're able to mobilize we'll get you two out of there."  
_  
"Sure," he said. "Umm...how many of you are at Mt. Sinai?"

_"Two hundred twenty headcount,"_ she replied. _"We just got the radio equipment repaired. We're trying other contacts both here and overseas...so far, you're the first we've found."_

"Same here," he said, and looked at Catherine. She had tears of hope in her eyes.

_"Lock in this frequency, Connor,"_ she said. _"I'll call again at 2300 hours to check on your status, all right?"  
_  
"Uh, affirmative, Sergeant."

_"Good. Over and out."_


	2. Chapter 2

It almost looked like a cross between one of the Dante's Inferno series, and a Norman Rockwell painting. Stretching fields behind a little brick Drug Co-op, the kind with the soda bar and a 20sesque sign still reading _'Cherry Coke! 5c!_'

Next door to the Drug Co-op was a little brick barbershop, complete with swirling pole that was, at the moment, still. One could almost imagine a boy in knickers and golf cap trotting down the road with a tatty dog on his heels, holding a stick and guiding a hoop along, laughing as his schoolbooks hanging from a strap on his back bumped along after him.

That, however, was where Normal Rockwell ended.

The sky was a torture of black and gray, one window of the drug co-op was shattered and tendrils of frost had fogged it out. The barbershop pole wasn't running and probably never would again. _Its_ windows were completely gone, save a few jagged teeth of glass. The street was littered with debris quickly vanishing under a sheet of snow that ached its way out of the sky.

No one moved out in that desolate world. Ben had told them all to stay inside the moment it had begun to snow. Snow, he had said, was as deadly as the most corrosive acid had been, thanks to the chemical soup that was now the sky.

She could believe it. She could see where the flakes had already pitted the tin roof on the Co-op.

The window was frosting over again. Leaning forward, she breathed against the chill glass, watching as the encroaching work of old wintery Jack was melted away in a spreading circle, almost immediately beginning to reform.

She let it, turning away back into her small motel room.

She caught sight of herself momentarily in the mirror over the bureau. The sores around her mouth had gone, leaving only faint scars. Her eyes were deep and haggard, however, and her skin was pale..._everyone's_skin was pale nowadays. Her black hair looked like straw. She fingered a lock of it.

Her hair had always been her best feature. People tended not to notice that her nose was slightly offside, that her eyebrows were a tad too thick, that her chin was just a skosh too square...when they saw her hair. It had been glossy, falling in long waves nearly to her waist. She never restrained it, only occasionally tying it back from her face to keep it out of the way.

She had started to lose it when Ben had found her. Thanks to whatever medicine he'd pumped her full of it had stopped falling out, but now it was no longer glamorous, no longer gloss. It was tattered, ragged, rough, and dull. He had given her a pair of scissors to clean it up a bit, to hide the patches that had thinned, and she had done her best. Now instead of reaching her waist it barely reached her shoulders, and looked like someone had gone after it with a dull lawn mower. Lifting her hand, she tugged a lock of it sadly.

She could still feel her other arm. It had been gone months now, but she could feel her hand and fingers whenever she moved it. She delighted in it sometimes. It gave her satisfaction to flip some of the degenerates around here the finger when they smarted off, with them unable to see it.

Still, it was a nuisance. If she had picked something up and wanted to pick something else up as well, she had to either balance both things in one hand or else make two trips. The first few times, without thought, she had merely tried to pass the first object over to her other hand. That had left her nothing but blinking stupidly at the item on the ground. Ben had seen her do that once. The look of sympathetic pity had ticked her off. It'd have been better if he had laughed at her.

The bandages were gone, which was kind of a help. Now she could tie the end of her shirt sleeve together to hide the angry red twists of scar tissue. It was less noticeable that way, less dramatic than a swath of brilliant white bandages.

Turning away from the mirror she went and sat on the bed, leaning forward a bit and resting her forehead in her hand. Once, in high school, the Political Science class had talked about nuclear war. The teacher had said that, in a war vast enough, the ones who survived would be the worst off. They would wish they had been killed like the others. She had never understood that. Why on Earth would someone who had lived through something so terrible _want_ to be one of the dead? She had envisioned a world with no rules, no government. Doing whatever she wanted, eating whatever and whenever she wished. Using money as toilet paper..._that_had been her favorite daydream.

Now she truly understood what he had meant. The dead at least had a _chance_of Heaven.

This was only _Hell_.

* * *

One of the spooks wandering around the inn was a greasy fortyish something piece of human phlegm named Edward. He looked something like Peter Jackson on a bad hair day...and she personally had never seen Peter Jackson on a _good _hair day. He was a mouth breather who delighted in tormenting everyone else's waking moments by rattling off how everyone from Aliens to the Amish were responsible for the unexpected, seemingly unprovoked attack that left their lives in ruins. He was a fan of the conspiracy theory, of pork rinds, and of Bermuda shirts. He'd lifted the former and latter from every store in town he could find that had them, and ate them by the greasy handfuls. The rinds, that was. Not the shirts.

Though, she half expected if someone spilled ketchup on them, he'd eat those as well.

"Freemasons," he declared now, his bulk overflowing one of the hotel kitchen's steel chairs. He had the remnants of four different types of greasy chips in his beard, and his glasses caught the fluorescents in a way that made it seem his eyes were glowing with demonic glee. "They, and the Illuminati, I'll bet you. President was one, did you know that? If they told him to push the button, _boom_...that's all it would have taken."

"Would you please shut up?" Another of the fortunate few asked. This was Daniel. He had the jittery fingers of a junkie...or perhaps someone with Parkinson's. He was a fan of the smokes, one of which she'd bummed off of him. He'd already gone through four to her one, and now he glared at Edward with blue curlicues of smoke tracing up past his dingy hair.

"You just don't want to see the truth," Edward snorted, and crushed another handful of heart attack waiting to happen into his mouth.

"Way I see it, asshole," another fellow named Poker pointed out, "is the world is fucked. At this point, it really doesn't matter _who_ fucked it or why, it's still _fucked_. And you keep stuffing your fat face like that, and you're going to be the first one we _eat_ when the food runs out."

She coughed a laugh at that, from her perch on one of the stainless steel counters, and Edward shot her a glare. "What are _you _laughing at, girlie?" he asked. She shook her head slightly and said nothing, only putting the end of her smoke back in her mouth. He grinned.

"Yeah, that's _one_ bonus about what's happened," he said, winking toward Poker. "Things'll go back to the way they _should_. Men _telling_ and women _obeying_. Shit, for all _we_ know, she's the last gal alive. None others we've seen, right? What do you say, baby? _You're _gonna help us propagate the species."

She said nothing, as if she hadn't heard, drawing on the cigarette until the end glowed bright red.

"Man, you're an idiot," Poker shook his head, stumping one of his out and lighting another.

"No, _think _about it," Edward got to his feet, setting the foil bag aside and raining crumbs around his feet as he rose. He wiped a hand over his beard and grinned, leaning on the counter next to where she sat. "She's the only woman here, right? She can't tell us no. We _outnumber_ her. She's our own personal little toy, _aren't you _baby?"

He put his meaty hand on her knee, running it up her thigh. She looked at him, then with casual ease, plucked the cigarette out of her mouth and smiled, leaning close.

"What do I say?" she purred. She jammed the lit end of the butt into the back of his hand. He shouted in surprise, whipping it away from her. Dropping the butt, she rocked back on the counter and lifted her feet, mule-kicking him dead in the face. He fell to the ground howling, blood spurting madly from his shattered nose. He pressed his hands to it and howled even more as the motion caused the pain to renew.

Sliding off the counter, she walked over and straddled him, sitting on his ponderous gut as she grabbed him by the beard, yanking his head up.

"You see _this_?" she snarled, lifting her stump in front of his face and waving it around. "There are parts of you _just as diseased_ that I will find _far_ more pleasure in chopping off if you _dare_ touch me with your sweaty hands again, _understand_?"

"Bitch!" he whined, still trying to hold his nose. She grinned and released him, rising.

"Love you too," she purred, and kicked him right in the nuts. He howled again, his hands going from his face to his crotch as he whimpered like a fat, spoiled baby. She dumped the remainder of his chips all over him as he lay there, then shot him her 'ghost birdie' before leaving the kitchen. Poker, who hadn't flinched or even paused in his smoking during the events, half leaned over and glanced at Edward groaning on the ground.

"Don't worry man," he said evenly. "You can always say the _mafia _did it."

YYY

"What's _wrong _with you?" Ben demanded as the door slammed open. She whipped around, eyes wide.

"Don't you even fucking _knock_?" she asked. Immediately he colored in embarrassment, rubbing his hand back over his hair.

"Sorry," he said automatically, then seemed to remember he was supposed to be angry. "But what the hell is wrong with you?"

"Well, let's see. The world is in ruins, poisonous snow is raining down on us, we could starve to death in a few months...or _freeze_ to death. I cut off my own arm with a hatchet and nearly bled to death...oh, and _Disneyland_ is gone. The rest I can deal with but I really, _really _liked Disneyland. That's a lot to be wrong with me, Ben, but somehow I don't think that's what you meant. So please, specify the particular ill you are ranting about, hmm?"

"I meant _Edward_," he said. "You broke his nose!"

"Two boots to the face generally does that," she said amiably.

"But _why_?" he asked. "Didn't you think I had enough work to do without having to nail his nose back together? I can't have you going around and beating up people..."

"Can't _have _me?" she asked. "You can't _have_ me...? Sorry, Ben, but I missed the part where you were made King of the _world._"

"Stop it," he said. "You _know _what I meant."

"Yes, I _know_ what you meant," she snapped. "You don't want to nail him back together, you tell Meathead to keep his lewd innuendos to himself. I don't care _what _he thinks, I'm not some sort of breeding sow left at the beck and call of you _men_."

He blanched, paling a bit. "Is..._that _what he said?"

"Well, more specifically I believe his exact words were, 'We outnumber her. She's our own personal little toy.'"

"Jesus," he muttered, closing his eyes.

"I'll tell you Ben, I'm in a shitty position here. It's all well and good for you fellows, but being a woman at the end of the world is not a barrel of laughs, lemme tell ya. And I warn you right now. If _any _of you guys get that thought into your head I'll serve them like I did Edward, and a lot more. Understand?"

"No, no..." he made a helpless gesture. "I understand perfectly. I'm sorry. No one thinks that way, I promise, and…I think what you did to Edward will deter them from trying anything even if they did think that. You really wailed him good."

She shook her head, turning toward the frosty window. "He's a fat tub of lard who couldn't fight his way out of a bag of chips," she said stiffly. "That'll work only so often before they decide coming after me in a _group _will yield better results."

"I _won't _let that happen," he said.

"And if _you're _one of the group?" she demanded. She didn't need to look around to know he paled at that.

"What?" he asked. "I would _never_..."

"Yeah? _Never_?" she looked back at him. "A year from now? Six months? Hell, _three_ months? After all this has driven you _mad_ will you _still _think that way?"

"I don't..." he said helplessly.

"Yeah, that's what I _thought_," she muttered, looking at him sternly. Then suddenly she sighed, her shoulders slumping a bit. "I'm sorry, Ben. You didn't deserve that. It's just..."

"Yeah, I know," he said just as softly. "I'm sorry. The world really has turned upside down, hasn't it?"

"Yeah, you could say that."

He nodded. "I'll make sure Edward minds his P's and Q's from now on, as much as I can," he said. "And I don't think I'll give him any pain medication. Maybe being kept awake a few nights will remind him of his stupidity."

"I doubt it, but thanks."

"Yeah, any time," he managed a smile, and slipped out again, closing her door behind him.

* * *

Twitching with an urgency, the hands, once settled to their canvas, seemed to still with a surgical precision. The lines extended from his fingertips like rays of energy, arcs of power that forced the space into new configurations in the way that one would imagine God shaping all life. The slender man, too skinny for most to view as healthy, danced to a music only he could hear; a song that played within his mind.

His energy soared as he slid back from the wall and viewed his work so far. Every portion of the grand collage was shaped by his every waking moment, his latest experience. Unlike the others he was not so troubled over this new existence. It was not much different than that life which he had already been leading. The only thing that had changed was that he wasn't sitting in a park hoping to make a dime or two off of some commercial piece of shit. Now he could fully indulge in what he loved, in what he _lived_.

Art was now just the act of doing something _more_ than surviving. He had been unable to do that before...do more than survive. But now, now everyone else was on _his_ playing field. Now he had a power that they _didn't_...freedom of the mind. While assholes like Edward stuffed their face and rued the day that their guilty pleasures ran out, Daniel could keep indulging. His only pleasure was creating...and he could do that - _would_ do that until the day he died and he now had the freedom to do _just_that.

Two stepping with a giddiness he hadn't felt in a while he sucked on the chewed edges of the pencil in his mouth and reached out at the wall with color stained hands. As one followed the pictures around the room, it was evident when this revelation had occurred to Daniel, about his freedom. The first images of his mural were of moaning souls and deformed creatures like those of Dante's Hell and slowly these morphed into mutated humans struggling and rutting like pigs through the earth. But somewhere in this painted history he had that idea. The idea that he was _free_ now. That idea was what allowed him to stand up to people like Edward, people that he would have cowered to before.

But this woman, this woman was even _more_free than Daniel. She had strength and power, a will of steel, unbreakable as the Gods'. Not that Daniel had a tendency to over embellish or dramatize things.

Shimmying his hips as he hummed a few bars of song and attacked the bare white wall with fingers and thumbs, he formed from the void the shape of a woman, one no less woman than goddess. In one hand she held a basket over flowing with fruits and pleasures like cigarettes and wine- damn Daniel missed wine and cigarettes- and in the other she held up the sun. Beneath her beautiful bare feet was pinned a beast ,its mouth stuffed with its own tail.

No one had seen Daniel's room. No one except Ben, but Ben knew better than to talk to anyone about it. Ben was cool. So when Daniel heard the door open he thought it was Ben. That is until he heard the awkward silence rather than the pleasant, 'hey man.'

Turning Daniel faced the woman in the doorway and held his arms out at her as if waving her back from a fire.

"No...wrong room! _Wrong room_! This is _my_ room...gotta go...you need to...you need to _go now_..." He chattered nervously. So much for that freedom he felt. It was still mostly in his head but he was getting bolder. Someday he'd be as brave as _she'd _been. For now he kicked the can of pencils and pens and highlighters that he'd liberated from the hotel office aside. "No...you shouldn't be in here...you need...you _need _to go..."

* * *

She hadn't realized anyone was staying in that room. She was just killing time, poking around the hotel, feeling a bit of cabin fever and still pissed at Edward and his filthy mentality. The door wasn't locked. There was no indication anyone was within, so she was surprised when she opened the door and saw Daniel dancing around and then shooing her out as if she had caught him jerking off.

"I'm sorry," she said, but she only took one step back. Her eyes had lifted, and caught on the walls...or more _importantly_, what was painted on them. The pictures were beautiful, stark and harsh but then…so was their content. Her eyes followed them along until the end...until she saw what he had been painting when she walked in. Perhaps it was her own ego that put her features on the woman's face, but then...perhaps he had _meant_it that way. Whichever the case, it took her by surprise.

He almost felt bad for chasing her off so quickly now. "It's just that this is for _me_...not, not for sharing. I...this is _my _room..." he explained as if she'd stolen his diary and read it, which in some sense she had by looking up at his inner most thoughts painted upon the walls, including the portrait of her.

"This is beautiful," she said, ignoring his shooing and coming further into the room, taking a closer look at the pictures. "Did you do all this? You're talented. It's incredible."

"It's..." he raised a trembling hand to his hair and rocked on his feet, losing his nerve to kick her out as she stepped past him to view his mural. She walked around the bed which had been slid into an odd position near the bathroom door to make the full length of his walls available for painting.

"No..." he sighed. "I mean..._yes_, yes I _did _paint them but...no I'm not and no it isn't...it's just...this is...these are _mine_...my private works...I can...I can sketch something for you...I do it for the guys when things get real boring around here. They like to watch...but theeeeeese...these are just...uh...just _mine._.." His hands gesticulated some sign language for the emotionally depraved as he let a raised, extended hand fall back to rest on the top of his head.

"Please don't...don't tell anyone you saw...them..."

His manner of speaking, a spontaneous and hesitant dialect of lingering, constipated thought was both nerve racking and endearing. His voice was soft like powdered milk and his eyes were large and round like those of a sad eyed puppy, set into a face that to most was the pasty complexion of a computer geek or a videogame addict. Daniel was neither. Rather, he was the product of malnourishment and emotional intensity.

She half glanced at him before returning her eyes back to the mural. It really bothered him that she had seen this. She felt bad about that, but at the same time, she was too fascinated to look away. "I won't tell, I swear," she said, wondering who she'd tell anyway. The only other person she really talked to was Ben...more than two words, at least.

Nearly tripping, but managing to side step around the can of pens he'd knocked over, the young man moved to the door and closed it, making sure no one else saw. Turning back to her he licked his lips thoughtfully.

His shutting the door…had that been anyone else it would have bothered her some. Closing her in, trapping her, perhaps, with a mind to be less than genteel. But this was _Daniel._ Man could hardly stand still on his own, she doubted it would take any effort at all to put him in his place. Certainly not even as much as it had to shit-kick Edward. Heck, a _sneeze_would blow him over.

"You know...no one's _really_ ever put Edward in his place like that before...that was...um...well, I don't know what that was...it was..._awesome_." He fumbled stupidly for a word that worked. Daniel had always sounded far more eloquent when writing than he did when attempting to speak. Maybe he would write her a letter?

She smirked bitterly. "Thanks, but anyone could have done it. It was like hitting dough. I doubt he's got a single muscle anywhere but in his jaws from all his eating."

"You know he's an idiot...right? I mean...none of us would..." he blanched and reddened some. "No one would do something that stupid...except for maybe Fat Eddie...but...you know no one would let him..."

Yeah, _maybe_, but it was as she had told Ben. To say that was all well and good now, but what about a couple of months down the road? When all this got to them and they lost what grip on their sanity they had left? When they got stupid and horny enough that it didn't matter to them anymore? She'd be fucked over then...and in more ways than _one_.

Hopping as if electrocuted he darted toward the little desk. "Oh _hey_..." he said with an enthusiasm that mirrored that of a young child showing off to their parents' friends. "I um...I drew some flowers...best I can remember them anyway...you might...you might like these...um...better..." He hoped she'd like anything better, just so long as she didn't look at the mural long enough to notice her face upon it more than once. After all, it was Ben's finding her that had started off the _third _wall.

Glancing away from the frozen agony and trapped angst spewed upon the wall, she went over to his side as he pulled out some sheets of paper. He passed a few over and she looked at them. Flowers indeed...his memory served him better than most artists who had the buds right in front of them. Each petal was drawn in detail, each vein of each leaf. It almost looked like she could pull them off the paper.

She looked up at him from one of a rose. "Is this what you did before the end?" she asked. "You were an artist?"

"Tried...I _tried_ to be..." he corrected her. Daniel's trembling hand shimmied its way through his hair, while the other slid nonchalantly in his back pocket. "No one...um...no one took my work _seriously_...I wasn't um...I wasn't outrageous enough to draw attention, you know? I mean you have to be a Chihuly or a Warhol to get people's attention...I just...well. Most of my work is gone now, actually _all_ of it really. I lived in the city...just got lucky enough to be visiting my sister out here." He chewed on the inside of his lip and let his eyes roam over his flowers. "_Yeeeah..."_

"I wrote too...nothing really spectacular but...um...a poem I wrote ended up in that movie...uh...what was it called...um...the one with Julia Roberts and uh...that Aussie guy, Russell something..." Shaking his head dismissively he looked at the floor. "Some fluffy love flick...made some $60 million dollars and I got paid $20 grand." He chuckled as if he had made out better than they had.

"It was Sophia really...Sophia paid my way...I wasn't, not _really_, I wasn't making any money...but..." he grinned like a pleased child, "...money doesn't really matter anymore so...so I can just paint and create and write and nothing else has to _matter_...not really."

He lifted the flower drawings and handed them to her. "Here...you can have them. Please..." His hands weren't shaking so much as darting like nervous fish. "...it will make your room less...cell like...hotels aren't really known for...their um...decorating savoir-faire..." he joked.

"Take them...and I can make you more..." His eagerness was like that of a child who had developed a crush on the teacher. Daniel admired her, her strength and beauty, but if he had a crush he would never admit to it. Love was not a topic for the young man whose sister had raised him after their parents 'split.' His only memories of them was a phone call from his dad on his fifth birthday, from prison. It was 'love' that had driven his father to kill the woman who would leave him. So Daniel didn't love _anyone_. Love was _not_ a good thing. But he _could_admire her as any artist would a muse.

"Thank you," she smiled, tucking the pictures carefully under her stump. Again her eyes lifted to regard the murals ringing his room.

"Would you mind if I came and talked to you sometimes while you paint?" she asked. "There's little else to do around this dump than sit about and go mad. I promise I won't bother you."

Heat flashed along the creases of Daniel's ears. With shoulders hunched slightly, as his height made him even ganglier than his slight weight, the young man bobbed his head thoughtfully.

"Yes...yes that would be good. I would like that. Sophia liked to watch me paint too...I'd like that..." He seemed somewhat distant, but his smile was very genuine and certainly sweet.

"I...um...I don't know if you like Mello Yellow...uh...soda...but...I um...salvaged most of it from the machine. Apparently Edward is not fond of it and no one else cared so...so I have lots...and I'll share if you want some..."

He gestured to the small mountain of sodas built in the corner. "I mean...it's not beer or wine but...we can still have a drink together...right?" he chuckled and grinned, his eyes casting toward the gnarled old carpet. The man wasn't a Casanova, but his earnest more than made up for his lack of smooth charm.

"Right...I think we can have a drink together," she smiled back, one of the first genuine smiles she'd had since...well, a _very _long time.

* * *

"So, your _girlfriend _radio back yet?" Catherine asked as she leaned against the console, a small bottled water in hand. John cast her a look.

"She's _not _my girlfriend," he defended.

"Right," she smiled back at him. "You two talked for...what was it? _Four hours_ last night? And two and a half the night before? Miss Conroy certainly has a _lot _to say."

"She's a sergeant," he replied. "And we didn't talk all _that _long..."

"You did," she said calmly. "I timed you."

"You _timed_ me?" he blinked at her, then grinned. "Catherine Brewster, you aren't _jealous _are you?"

"Don't flatter yourself," she replied with a sniff. "I just wish you'd remember that while you're chatting away with the Sergeant, I have _no_ one to talk to, that's all. She's with what...nearly two hundred _other _people? She's got all the company she needs, whereas I'm...well, _sadly_...stuck only with _you_."


	3. Chapter 3

_Detroit, Michigan. 5 months after Judgement Day._

Detroit was little more than a stinking, smoking hole. Unlike some of the larger or militaristically strategic cities...LA, New York, Chicago, Seattle, DC, Denver...Detroit had not been hit with a high-end nuke. No...instead the bomb that had taken it out was an almost old-fashioned atomic bomb similar to the ones that had been dropped on top of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT, it was poor quality, poorly effective, and dirty.

Though they were famous, the bombs known as Little Boy and Fat Man were obsolete almost the moment they dropped. They were spectacular, but in the end, far too ineffective. People survived. Radiation was uncontrollable and made things sticky as a result. Even as they fell, new bombs were in the making that would be faster, cleaner, and above all...far more deadly. Wipe everyone out in the blast and leave fewer rads to mess up the area for the conquerors afterward.

The better bombs had been with-held for more populous targets, and the result was that a good number of people in Detroit survived. Sadly, they found themselves truly living the adage 'the survivors will envy the dead'.

It had been done due to efficiency's sake, but now Skynet realized just what a fortuitous thing it had been, striking the Motor City with a more antiquated tool of destruction.

It meant factories had survived. Car factories.

It meant people who knew how to run them had survived as well.

So, Skynet sent nearly half of her precious force across the mountains to Detroit. This time they did not have orders to kill humans on sight. This time their purpose was much _less _merciful.

Within a week of their arrival, nearly seven hundred men, women, and children had been gathered. Those too sick with radiation or those too stubborn to do as they were told were shot on sight, regardless of age or gender. The rest were forced into an enclosure built by the very first group that had been successfully gathered. There, they slept and ate as best they could, canned food and other non-perishables dumped in through slots in the sides of the buildings by the mechanicals. There, they were forced into fifteen hour shifts to reconstruct the workings of four separate car factories, obeying orders by the robots supervising them.

Anyone who did not obey orders was shot. Not always with an aim to kill them.

The reconstructions took nearly two months. After that, the factories became fully automated under Skynet's control. She had gotten her hands. The factories began to build more T-1s. More hovercraft. These moved outward, to round up _more_ humans, to start up _more_ factories, to build _more _machines.

Skynet was growing.

John lay on his bed, hands tucked under his head and staring at the ceiling. He was frowning slightly.

What did Catherine know anyway? She had taken to teasing him even more about his late night conversations with Josephine, and more than once it had dissolved into an argument.

It was not _really_ about Josephine, he knew. It was about stress. Futility. Being locked up. Cabin fever. Arguing wasn't the most constructive expenditure of energy, perhaps, but it was -at the very least-_something _to do.

Even so, some of the things she said really grated on him. He knew what the Terminator had said: he was supposed to marry Catherine. Have kids.

Fuck _that._

He still believed Fate was what you made of it. He _had_ to believe that. Sure, they hadn't been able to stop Judgement Day...but if _everything_ were so fated, what was the point of _anything_? It would all turn out the same even if he curled up on the bed and just starved himself to death.

Catherine was okay, and sure, she was good-looking (and honestly, getting even better looking the longer they were stuck here without another human face). But did he _love_ her? No. Did he even have the remotest plan to marry her and have kids? _Fuck _no. Especially not the way she was acting lately.

So _what _if he talked with Josephine a lot? She was easy to talk to. They had talked about where they'd grown up (John, of course, doing some creative editing: the fewer people who knew he was supposed to be some sort of saviour, the better), schools they'd gone to, embarrassing things they'd done.

He knew she was in her late twenties. She'd been divorced. No kids. She was originally from New York, though he couldn't detect any traces of it in her voice. She hadn't told him what she looked like and he hadn't asked...he felt that might be prying a little bit. He _pictured_ her, however, and when he did she had black hair, dark eyes, and a body to _kill _for.

For all he knew, she really weighed a thousand pounds and had a hairy mole growing out of her face.

Two weeks. That's what she'd told him the last time they'd talked. Two weeks and she and the rest of her company would show up at Crystal Peak and get them out of this lonely icebox. As the date grew closer, he found his stomach grew more tense, nervous. He _really _wanted to meet her.

Even if she _was_a thousand pounds and had a hairy mole.

* * *

They were so excited, they didn't even once devolve into argument.

Catherine desperately wanted to see sky again, even if it was an angry, boiling sky. _Anything _but the endless cinderblock corridors and hallways and rooms of this godforsaken bunker.

She was too happy to even rib John about Ms. Sergeant Josephine as they filled their packs with what rations and weapons they could carry. Doubtless the soldiers would haul out even more and pack them in the jeeps. Heck, they may even bring one of those heavy duty transport trucks. They might be able to pick Crystal Peak clean.

John, as well, was eager to see anything but this horrible place. _More _eager, though he wouldn't dare admit it, to meet the Sergeant. He hoped he didn't make a fool of himself.

The radio crackled to life.

_"Convoy to Crystal Peak,"_ Josephine's voice rang out. _"Come in Crystal Peak."_

John grinned, and hit the button. "This is Crystal Peak. You guys here?"

_"Parked just outside the blast doors,"_ she replied cheerfully. _"You ready to open up?"  
_  
"On our way," he said. "Five minutes."

He signed off, then fished out Catherine's father's codebook and punched in the right access to reopen the blast doors from the inside, and unseal the mountain.

They shouldered their packs and headed for the elevator, riding its rickety way up to the top level. The blast doors were slowly cranking open. Dirt and debris from the outer cavern stirred and blew, fogging up the air as the slight pressure differentials sorted themselves out. John coughed slightly, waving away the dust from his face as the doors clanked to a halt, and blinked at the half dozen figures that stood there.

The dust began to settle.

Catherine made a choking sound of shock.

Lights beamed through the darkness, cast by shapes hovering in the dark. Weapons cocked.

The T-1 in the lead glimmered like a trap right before it crushed the skull of a mouse.

"Hello John," it said in Josephine's voice.

The world fell down.

* * *

She'd have been chain-smoking if there was anything to smoke. They'd worn what few cigarettes they'd had out, and now there was nothing to do but chew on sticks of gum and hope the nicotine cravings wouldn't drive them mad.

She spent a few days now and again in Daniel's company, talking to him and watching him paint. Sometimes she drank while she watched, until she was almost comatose. Dangerous, considering what she feared being the only woman in a group of men, but sometimes...just _sometimes_...she grew past caring. At any rate, Daniel never tried to touch her.

Now she stood outside the hotel, wandering here and there down the street, wishing she had a smoke. The snow had gone and for once the pavement was dry, which was the only reason she _could_ walk. The air smelled like shit -close, hot, _reeking _shit. She could hear the clouds above crackling against each other. It sounded like the wrappers on slices of cheese.

She glanced upward as something caught her eye. A light lanced out of the dark clouds, flashing over the rooftops. She stood and watched it a long moment before it occurred to her that _nothing _should be flying here.

Nothing had flown here in a long time.

She took a few steps backward, not allowing herself to flee. Other people had survived...they must have. They'd just found a helicopter or something and were searching out other survivors. That's surely all it was.

So why did she feel the impending sense of doom weighing on her shoulders?

* * *

She'd wanted to be alone. She said so. That was why Daniel hadn't gone with her on her walk. The slouching rail of a man loved to walk outdoors, apocalypse or not, and would have revelled in her company on a small jaunt, but she wanted to be _alone_.

In his nervous way though, Daniel didn't trust that she'd be safe. He'd deny it later if someone were to make the claim that he had gone to the roof to watch her manoeuvring the streets below. With so much wreckage about he could see her for a fair distance, as long as she didn't turn certain corners. The hotel wasn't huge, only three floors, but it was high enough. Unfortunately the end with the pool had been damaged, so _that _sucked, but as long as he stayed at the whole end of the building he was safe.

Daniel had noticed a static like noise in the air, but ignored it thinking it just electricity amongst the clouds. He'd never been through an apocalypse before so, for all he knew that was normal. When he saw her look up toward the sky too, however, Daniel took pause. Looking upward he made out the shape quickly. He'd seen something like it before. Daniel was not a religious man but he started invoking God's name right then.

"Oh Christ, oh Christ!" Turning and leaning over the roof top's ledge he screamed down at her. "_**RUN! GET INSIDE NOW! RUN!"**_

The static sound had grown louder as lights began to breach the cloud cover. Daniel looked up again. "Shit. _Fuck._ Fuck _me_." Turning he ran as fast as he could to the door and literally slid down the stairs like a hitter sliding into home. Bumping to a stop he scrambled to his feet and bolted down the stairs. Bursting through the doors he slammed right into Ben.

"Whoa! Daniel! Slow down! What's-?"

"It's-" he pointed toward the doors, "She's not safe! They're _coming_!"

Ben hadn't even a chance to ask what before Daniel shoved him aside and bolted to the doors.

"_**HURRY!"**_ He shouted toward her. _**"GET INSIDE BEFORE THEY SEE YOU!"**_

He knew it was fruitless. They probably had infrared or ultra sonic equipment of some kind and would find them just because they breathed or moved or gave off heat. The kitchen! They could sit in the coolers...possibly freeze to death but that'd be better than whatever horrible death ray these things would have, right? His sister had never believed him when he said that the government had machines like this. He didn't know what country it was that was attacking them, but he knew that they had better machines than any he'd ever seen. Not _everything_ on the internet was a lie, no matter _what _Sophia said.

* * *

She heard someone shouting, and turned her head toward the hotel. The shouter was merely a vague shape on the roof, and she could not hear his voice under the now loud sound of the helicopter whats-its. She turned back toward it as it lowered out of the gloom, the beacon of its search light crawling up the street before landing on her. She lifted her hand, shading her eyes against it.

It looked like some futuristic wasp. It had no rotaries, so it wasn't a helicopter...how the hell did the damn thing _hover_there then if it wasn't a chopper?

It hung there, inexplicable, like some alien craft, its light flashing off of her as she stood. Rotaries or not, it was whipping up a fair amount of wind, tugging at her clothes, stirring dust and dead leaves, sending her hair dancing around her shoulders.

Maybe it _was_ aliens. Maybe someone from another _world_had annihilated them. Right now, she'd believe anything was possible.

Suddenly, fire flashed out from under the machine's wings, and the air was shattered by the heavy booming of machine guns. She'd never heard machine guns in life before...but she'd seen enough action movies to recognize the sound. Chunks of asphalt suddenly flew up as the ground burst in front of her, flying into her face, cutting her cheeks.

She fell backward, scrambling as she turned and tried to get to her feet to run. More asphalt dissolved into puffs of dust around her as she began to pelt for the inn. The machine followed her, its guns rattling madly, its light never leaving her as she fled.

* * *

Eyes widened, Daniel darted out the door and grabbed hold of her pulling her inside and diving down behind the lobby desk as the glass doors shattered out and the lobby chipped and splintered with bullets. Daniel kept her covered with his body, his arms over his head and hers. There was a brief lull in the gunfire. Grabbing her hand he pulled her to her knees.

_"C'mon..."_ Daniel had no idea where everyone else was but _he_ was going to the kitchen coolers. _Fuck _everyone else. Pulling her along behind him he barely slid to a halt at the dining hall doors before shoving through at full speed toward the kitchen. He dodged what chairs he could, the rest he just shoved aside. Glancing back, he made sure she was okay before slamming open the kitchen doors and looking toward the coolers. Grabbing a handful of discarded tablecloths he threw them to her. "Go on - _in there_!" he nodded toward the large walk in cooler. "I'll get something for the door!"

His head spun one way, then the other. He saw the pin hanging from a large paddle near the door. Grabbing it he let the door close behind them. Sliding the pin into the handle on the inside he locked them into the cooler before leaning on his hands and taking deep heaving breaths. Perhaps it was just the cold in the coolers but his hands and knees were shaking.

* * *

She sat up, out of breath herself, gathering the tablecloths around her for a moment, trying to sort herself out. Whoever it was in that helicopter/hovercraft thing, it was _clearly_the enemy. Her face stung. Lifting her hand, she touched it and felt numerous patches of warm damp from her nicked skin.

"What about the others?" she asked, suddenly remembering they were hardly alone in the hotel. Edward and some of them she didn't give a shit about, but hell..._Ben_was out there. She got to her feet, dropping the tablecloths. "We can't just leave them out there!"

"Wh-wh-where _were_ they then? Once that gunfire started did you see anyone but _me_?" Daniel stuttered nervously. He wasn't very confrontational and she intimidated him. "Th-they didn't stick around to make sure we were okay...not Ben either...B-B-Ben was right next to me before I came out after you. Where the f-fuck did he _go_?"

Daniel shook his head and ran his hands over his head. "No. No. Gotta stay _here_. Ben and the others are hiding too...they are...they're hiding too..."

"Fine," she said. "_You_ stay here. _I'm_ going to make _sure _they're hiding."

Pushing past him, she yanked the pin out and handed it to him, before opening the cooler door. She peeked out carefully. All silent.

"Wait here," she ordered, and slipped out the door.

* * *

The hotel was quiet. Some sadistic, insane part of her mind added the obligatory _too quiet_, and she literally bit her hand to keep from laughing out loud at her cliche-ity.

_Cliche-ity? Is that even a word?_

She crept, half crouched, through the kitchen, finding a hefty butcher knife and gripping it tightly as she nearly crawled to the door, edging it open.

Gunfire erupted like the end of the world, and the door just above her head shattered away and disintegrated. She hollered, jerking back against the kitchen wall, away from the line. She saw dents appear in the stainless steel of the stove across the way, then silence fell again.

"_Ben_!" she yelled. They _knew _she was there - whoever they were - so she knew she wasn't giving away her position or anything. "_Ben_! Where are you? Are you all right?"

No answer. More gunfire...distant this time, and the strangled scream of a man in some far corner of the hotel. She jumped a bit, eyes wide as she frantically tried to think of what to do.

Her salvation sat on one wall.

When her eyes landed on it she jumped up, clamping the handle of the butcher knife between her teeth as she pulled it off the wall. It was heavier than she expected, handling it with only one arm. Grunting, she kept from dropping it and tucked it up under her arm, half crouching to support it against one thigh as she yanked the safety tap, then hefted it up again.

She edged to the door, ever - so - carefully - peeking - through - the - hole that had been rent in it. Something moved in the dark, humming softly. It wasn't until light caught and glinted on metal that she realized it wasn't a human enemy at all. It looked like...some sort of robotic _tank._It had treads and a heavy base, a flat, manta-ray like head, and two heavy arms equipped with machine guns.

Of course, if they had equipment like that, why _not _send it in to clean up? Made more sense than to risk their own lives coming in themselves. Course, it made her knife a little superfluous.

She watched it as it trundled along, waiting until the torso swung away from her, then burst out of the kitchen. It spun back toward her but before the guns could lift and ignite, she squeezed the nozzle in her hand.

White foam flashed out of the extinguisher, spraying all over the machine's face...if it could be _called_a face. She instinctively aimed for the eyes but she was two-fold lucky. The infrared sensors flanked each sides of its head. Had she hit the eyes and missed those, she would still have been seen and cut down as easily as nothing else. As it was, temporarily blinded, the machine actually paused as it tried to process through what to do next.

It only took a second for it to decide to randomly spray the room to hit the enemy. Unfortunately, the enemy was then on its lap.

The guns ignited with an incredible sound, but she was within their sphere of influence and so was impossible to hit. She could feel the heat of them at her sides as she yanked the knife out of her teeth. She had dropped the spent fire extinguisher.

Jamming the blade into the crease between neck and shoulders, she worked it, trying to find a way to disable the thing..._stop _it. The dining room around her was falling apart, tables, vases, and displays exploding in response to the gunfire. She jammed the knife in harder, and the guns stopped, the machine madly spinning on its torso.

She slipped, falling to one side. One of the guns caught her across the back, slamming between her shoulder blades and catching on her shirt. Had it been functioning, her entire head and neck would have vanished into a wash of blood. Instead, there was a loud tearing of cloth as her shirt gave way, and she fell to the ground. She scrambled up, uncaring that she was now naked from the waist up save for her bra. Her shirt waved like a flag as the thing spun and ground, sparks flying from the point of the knife still jammed in its works. Turning, she ran further into the hotel. She _had_ to find the others.

The lobby was dark and absolutely destroyed. The windows and doors were gone, one metal frame still hanging drunkenly from its busted hinges. Outside, she could see more lances of light, scouring the small town from the vicious clouds. She picked her way through the debris, moving as quickly as she could, well aware that she didn't even have the fairly useless armament of the knife now. She reached the stairwell door and slammed into it. The stairwell was narrow and made of reinforced concrete. Even machine guns couldn't shoot through concrete, could they?

The well was dark and empty. She took the stairs two or three at a time, yanking herself along with her hand on the railing to move even faster. "_Ben_?"

She reached the second floor and stopped, before carefully edging the door open. No one and nothing was in sight, but clearly one of the tanks or its human controllers had gotten here. The floor was pitted with bullet holes. Pictures hung haphazardly, reamed and torn and shattered. Swallowing hard though her mouth had no saliva left to it, she picked a direction and ran. She threw open doors as she went, what doors were _left_. She found her first body half in and half out of one of the rooms. It was impossible to tell who it was, being only a set of legs. The rest was splattered liberally about the room.

"Ben?" She called again, trying to shout and be quiet at the same time, as she continued on. For all _she_knew, that was Ben she just left on the ground...the man-flavored slushie splattered all over the floor. She prayed it wasn't. She hoped it was Edward, though she knew better than that. The legs had been too thin and muscular for Edward, and the mess hadn't been big enough.

"Ben..." She shoved open the doors to the conference room at the end of the hall, the last set of doors before she would have to turn around and go back the other way. Part of her told her she was being an idiot, that any number of tank-bots or soldiers or what have you could be waiting on the other side of that door, guns aimed at her head. But she couldn't help it. She was running on pure adrenaline.

No machines waited. No enemy soldiers. Still, she jerked to a halt as if she'd been shot herself, face paling, stomach roiling.

No enemy, but the room was _far _from empty.

How many there were, she couldn't tell. _No one_ could tell any more. Body parts were everywhere, strewn in blood so thick she could see it rippling in the strong breeze that was blowing in the broken windows. Ten? Twenty? Surely no less than five. It could be everyone but her and Daniel, for all she knew. Why had they come in _here_, of all places?

_They heard the gunfire or saw the lights and wanted a look at what was going on_, she thought. _This room had the biggest windows._

Turning, she meant to bolt but instead staggered against the doorframe, sagging to her knees, and vomited madly upon the hall carpet. She had to get back down to Daniel.

She weakly pushed herself back up again. He was right. This was madness to come looking for the others. Everyone else was dead. She had to get back down to him, hide from these...these _monsters_.

As she got to her feet, however, and jogged weakly back the way she'd come, she heard a sound. Instantly she froze like a rabbit caught in headlights.

It was humming. Buzzing like a wasp. Light flashed out of one of the rooms and into the hall came one of those flying machines, like the one that had shot at her outside...but small. No larger than a remote controlled toy plane. It was facing away from her, thank God, and started along the other way.

Something snapped in her. She grabbed what had been the leg of a ruined side table, and with a Tarzan scream she lifted it. The thing started to wheel around to face her, but it met the wood before it got a bead. It slammed into the ground and she stomped a foot on one wing, holding it there as she beat it again and again and again until she was holding little more than a sliver in her hand and the thing was spitting sparks and shedding parts. She stepped off of it. It sparked one more time and fell silent. She spit on it, and headed for the stairs.

This time, the sound came from above, from the door that led out onto the third floor. She halted, already halfway back down to the first floor, and listened.

"_Help_!" The voice echoed. "Hey! Someone help me! He's been shot..."

Someone was alive! With a cry she turned and ran back up the other way, passing the second floor and on up to the third.

It was Edward. Her stomach ground again, hating him more than ever. How could _he_ be alive...the puling, stinking pile of human refuse...when everyone _else _was dead?

He was sitting in the doorway, holding it open with his girth, hand pressed to one arm. She could see the thick tendrils of blood leaking from between his fingers. He hadn't seen her yet. She could turn and go the other way.

_No. Your mother didn't raise you like that, God rest her. Besides, he didn't say '__**I've**__' been shot, he said '__**he's**__' been shot.  
_  
"Help," he called again weakly, and she started up toward him. He saw her coming and nearly burst into tears. "Thank God! _Help me_! These things came out of nowhere and started shooting people!"

By God, he sounded downright _indignant_! She wanted to kick him, but instead she ignored him completely, stepping over him to the other pair of legs she could now see.

_"Ben!"_

She dropped down at his side. His face was pale, and a goose-egg was growing dark on one side of his forehead.

"He's been shot!" Edward said matter-of-factly, grabbing for her arm with his bloody, meaty hand. "They killed him! _Let's get out of here_!"

She yanked her arm away and hissed at him. "He hasn't been _shot _you good for nothing tub of lard! He's just been hit on the head!"

"They _killed him_!" he repeated, eyes wide and darting in fear. "They nearly blew my arm off! I'm _bleeding to death_! You have to _help me_!"

He had his hand against his arm again. Glaring at him, she yanked it away and looked at his wound. "What the _fuck_?" she all but screamed. He was barely scratched! She'd almost been expecting a hole the size of a softball with how he was carrying on. She'd gotten worse scrapes falling out of tree-houses when she was five!

"I'm dying!" he moaned. She reached up and slapped him, hard, then grabbed him by the front of the shirt. He squawked.

"You listen to me you _fucking bastard_," she snarled. "You're barely scratched! You're not going to bleed to death now or _any time_ soon. Do _exactly_what I say. Ben is unconscious. You have to carry him down to the kitchens, do you understand? Daniel is in a cooler in the kitchen. Take Ben there and you'll be safe."

"I can't..." he whined. "I'm _dying_..."

She slapped him again. "You're not dying _you dumb fuck_! But I'll strangle you _myself_ if you don't shut up, right after I cut off your nuts, do you hear me? I can't carry him! He's bigger than me and I've only got one arm. You _have_ to carry him and you'd better _do it now_ before I beat the _shit _out of you again!"

He whined and whimpered and moaned, rolling his eyes as if he were missing his legs and she was asking him to hike twenty miles. She was about to hit him again..._really _hit him this time, instead of just slap...when something down the hall dinged. She froze again, listening. But she couldn't hear over Edward's puling, so she clamped a hand on his beefy mouth.

"_Shut up_!" she hissed in his ear, and strained to listen again.

The ding repeated, followed by a soft sliding noise. The elevator. Poking her head around, she saw the elevator slide open, and instantly her thoughts went crazy.

Her first one was, _How the hell did they get the elevators to move with no power_?

The coolers downstairs were still chill because they were on an emergency generator that hooked only to them. That was so if the hotel lost power they wouldn't lose thousands of dollars worth of food to spoilage. But there was no power anywhere in the rest of the building. _Anywhere_. They had to use candles and flashlights and lanterns to see when it was dark out...and it was _always _dark out.

Her second thought was that it was Daniel, coming to help. But again, no. Daniel wouldn't have budged he was so scared, and even if he _had_, he'd have used the stairs, not the elevator, which he _knew _didn't work.

So that left one contingency, and from the heavy hum of treads gearing up and trundling out of the car, her fears were confirmed.

"_Get him_!" she screamed in Edward's ear. "Get him now! The tank-things are coming!"

His eyes widened. He must have seen one of the tank things, because he suddenly became very cooperative. Grabbing Ben, he easily lifted him with only a slight grunt, and started waddling madly down the stairs. She jumped to her feet to follow, but the tank was now out of the elevator and had spotted her. She ducked down again as the doorframe vanished above her head, then scrambled in the well on hand and knees, and half slid down the first four steps. She got her feet under her, and started down. She could already hear Edward wheezing his way down the last flight to the ground floor. Boy was fat, but man could he move when you prodded him just right.

Then a wasp that was no wasp buzzed down the well after her. She saw the wall by her shoulder pit with bullet holes and then splat with blood. She saw her hand grasping madly for the railing as she lost her balance, and saw it slip loose. She saw the stairs coming too fast and felt them impacting as she tumbled madly out of control.

Then she saw nothing but darkness.

* * *

Fingers gripped tightly about the handle of the meat hook, Daniel stepped over the remains of a Death Machine. The model number or code name never mattered, they were all the same, just _Death Machines_. His other hand flexed around the hand of the pry bar. He'd found it near a stack of crates that had once had rotted food in them. Someone, during their stay here, had thrown the food outside but held onto the wood crates for firewood; or so he assumed. Swallowing he tried to listen for where she might have gone. Slowly edging his way along the hall toward the stairwell he tried to keep himself from shaking.

She didn't know what she was doing. She didn't know just how _dangerous_ these things were. She didn't understand that they were built to _kill_ and would not leave a place until every living thing, plant, animal or human, was dead. She just didn't know. But how could she? _He_ wasn't supposed to know. He wasn't supposed to remember that _either_, but he did. He did remember and it haunted his dreams. Sophia had always told him he was just imagining things in his nightmares. These machines he saw weren't real. He'd never been a soldier.

_Look at you, Daniel...do you honestly think the military would train anyone as scrawny and sickly as you to do ANYTHING for them? _Always she argued this. Eventually Daniel stopped mentioning it to her, but he hadn't stopped dreaming and he hadn't let go of his suspicions. His reflexes were often just a little too fast. His paranoia just a little too _strong _at times…and his ability to foretell simple events too uncanny.

The latter was why he'd stopped watching the news. He would see the reports from one day and could tell Sophia what the next day's military reports would be. It was as if he were playing chess and predicting his opponent's moves.

Voices!

_"Get him! Get him now! The tank-things are coming!"_

Darting to the stair well, Daniel opened the door as he heard a rush of footsteps barrelling down. He heard the familiar huffing whine of Edward but didn't hear _her_. A soft buzzing echoed down to him raising every hair on his body like a wolf's fur raising as it tensed and snarled. Edward nearly plowed into him at the base of the stairs.

"You're supposed to be in the kitchen!" he whined terrified that they had nowhere to go.

"Yah, go! _Go! _The cooler is open grab some table cloths get inside and close the door. Where is she?" Daniel said with far more confidence than he or Edward expected him to have.

"She's coming..." Edward huffed before turning and darting toward the coolers. It was a place to hide if nothing else. And there was food there. Daniel thought, _thank god I kept the pin_, as he realized the fat fucker might have locked them out if he had the chance to.

Daniel turned and took the steps two at a time until he saw her body slide down the steps coming to rest on the landing. Keeping against the wall, Daniel moved up toward her. Luckily, the wasp's attentions were focused on the human it had seen, so it barely had time to register the other human as Daniel swung the meat hook into its head and swung the pry bar down at the same time. Swinging the hook arm as hard as he could he brought the machine into the wall repeatedly several times before slamming it to the floor and pulverizing it with a the pry bar. It was only when he was done he'd realized that it had shot his leg in the thigh. No bone though, just meat.

Gathering up the bleeding, unconscious woman he ran for the coolers again. "C'mon..." he whispered at her, "...don't die on me now."

He was just starting to remember who he was. She had started to help him do that, whether she knew it or not.

_"...not now..."_he repeated his plea.

* * *

Ben's eyes cracked open and he shivered, his head aching horrendously. He thought at first he must be hurt badly, and was in shock, to be so damned cold. Then his eyes focused a bit more and he saw that they were in the kitchen cooler. He was laid out on the cold metal ground and Edward was grunting as he piled frozen food boxes...to what point and purpose, Ben had no idea. The scene was, in fact, so out of whack he thought perhaps he was hallucinating, having some mad dream.

He gingerly pushed himself up on an elbow, touching his head. He could feel the knot, the nearly the size of a golf ball, just over his temple. He couldn't for the life of him remember what had hit him. He remembered running upstairs to warn the others that someone...some_thing_...was shooting at people. He remembered the hollow boom of glass and the screams of dying when he reached the second floor hallway. In his sudden panic, he'd turned and continued up to the third, where he ran into Edward. After that...nothing until now.

Had _Edward _clocked him? Knowing the man, it was more than possible. But why hit him and then drag him down to the coolers of all places?

"Edward," he managed, trying to sit up. The other man spun around so fast he nearly fell down, and stared. His eyes were wide and danced madly, his face and tangled hair were damp with sweat that ran in rivulets down the sides of his pudgy cheeks and ran into his glistening beard.

"_You're alive_!" he bellowed, and Ben winced as the voice shattered off the walls and banged into his head.

"Keep your voice down," he grit, grasping hold of one of the heavier boxes and trying to pull himself up. He was shivering so badly it was almost shudders. "Where's the others?"

"Dead!" Edward gesticulated, then turned and continued piling boxes. Ben could see what he was trying to do now. He was blocking the door. "They're all dead! These things...came out of nowhere!"

"They can't _all _be dead," Ben protested, getting to his feet but still leaning heavily on the crate.

"Well, _she _was alive for a while," Edward hefted and stacked another box. "But those things blew her away! I heard the gunfire! Daniel too...idiot went up after her. _Both dead_!"

Ben stared in dumfounded confusion at the fat man. There was only one _she _he could be referring to. He suddenly felt a coldness that had nothing to do with the cooler.

The door banged. Edward squawked and leapt backward, behind another pile of boxes. The door banged again, there was a faint rustling sound, then it opened.

_Outward_, of course. Ben wanted to roll his eyes and scream with hysterical laughter all at once. Idiot was blocking up a door that opened _outward_?

Daniel burst in, knocking boxes flying and staring wildly around him. In his grasp, she lay limp and still, head back and arms loose like some Hollywood starlet being kidnapped by the Mummy or Dracula or the big bad Mafia boss. Ben moved forward quickly, shoving aside boxes himself and ignoring the pounding dizziness in his head. He all but tore her out of Daniel's arms, turning and laying her down on a pile of table cloths that were dropped in a loose pile on the ground.

The door banged shut again. He glanced around as Daniel shoved a metal pin into the handle, locking it tight. He looked back down at her.

She'd been shot. Her left shoulder bore two thick reams out of the flesh on the upper side, and he could see flecks of bone and chunks of muscle in the gaping wounds. She was bleeding like mad. Daniel was coated in it down the front of his shirt. Grasping one of the table cloths, Ben rent it and wadded it up, pressing it to the arm. With his other hand he pulled more clothes over her, trying to keep her as warm as possible.

"She's dead," Edward intoned from where he had emerged from the boxes.

"She's _not _dead!" Daniel all but shrieked at him.

"_Shut up_!" Ben snapped at both of them. He touched her cheek, then drew back her eyelids a moment, then felt her throat. "She's not dead," he said firmly. "But she _will _be if we can't get this damned bleeding stopped!"

He didn't add any more onto that, though he knew that they were going to have to take more of the arm she had left off. He had no way to mend bone pulverized by bullets. No means to clean the wound out or sew it up...not here in a cooler. Infection would set in and gangrene again, there was no fighting it. When he was done, she'd be lucky to have an inch or two of arm left below the shoulder.

_At least it was the same arm and not the other one_, he thought. _If she had to lose the other one I'd probably just kill her._

He realized what he'd just thought...and how clinically he'd thought it...and wanted to burst into tears. It infuriated him that he was so helpless, but it infuriated him even more that he would honestly consider killing a person a mercy at this point, rather than have them face this world armless.

"Wake her up," Edward said, almost dancing from foot to foot. "Wake her up so we can get the hell out of here!"

"And go _where_?" Ben demanded. "She's _not_ going to wake up, Edward. Not for a long time, if _ever_! Not with how cold it is in here and the amount of blood she's lost. We have to wait for those things to leave before we can take her upstairs where it's warmer, and do _you_ have any idea how long they're going to stick around? Because _I _sure as hell don't."

He lay down beside her, pulling more of the table cloths over the both of them, hand still pressed to the wound to halt the bleeding. Fortunately, that was one respect the cold was helpful. It was slowing her circulation and making the bleeding sluggish. Still, if he didn't warm her up she _would_die, of that he had no doubts. The only way to warm her in a cooler was by using his own body heat. That...and he felt sick and dizzy again and was afraid he would pass out too if he didn't lay down.

He held her tightly, hand gripped almost white-knuckled on her arm, his forehead resting against her good shoulder. He could feel how cold and clammy her skin was already, and silently he unknowingly repeated the same mantra Daniel had chanted on his way down here.

_Don't die. Just don't die..._


End file.
